Most grandparents leave stuff to grandkids that they either treasured as kid or that’ll be worth something down the line. Lee John Phillips’s granddad left him a garage full of junk. He didn’t leave it a will, no one wanted it. So Lee John did something really cool with it — he drew it all. All 100,000 pieces of garage crap.
When Lee John Phillips’ grandfather passed away, he left behind a tool shed packed with a lifetime of old tools, hardware, and odds and ends. As an artist by training, Lee took inspiration from the dense, seemingly limitless stash of unique artifacts and began organizing and drawing collections of them in his sketchbook.
What started on a whim has turned into a 5-year journey to catalog every item in his grandfather’s tool shed. So far, Lee is around 20 months in and has covered approximately 4,000 items from the collection. Lee says on his Instagram account “I still can’t really estimate [the 4,000 items] as a percentage of the total. However, I feel I’m nowhere near 10% complete.” Lee’s best guess is that there are over 100,000 individual items in the shed.
The photos Phillips is posting to Instagram are really amazing and worth a look.
It’s a pretty awesome way to honor grandpa and all his stuff. I’ve been inspired to draw all of MeeMaw’s housecoats. Luckily, she only owns one.
[via Makezine]